Key Artifacts Product Managers Should Maintain
The ultimate goal of a PM is to ship the right product successfully to users. To increase the likelihood of success, especially in a remote environment, a PM needs to create the right processes to ensure that different teams (especially across timezones) are aligned. To do this, product managers should have up-to-date documentation and ensure that these documents are visible to the right stakeholders.
But isn’t documentation and planning not agile? I do not think so! The “Agile Manifesto”, drafted in 2001 by seventeen software developers, put forward the following principles:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
I personally wholeheartedly agree that the elements on the left are more valuable than those on the right. However, note that the manifesto never argued for ditching documentation altogether. Rather, it suggests that we should be smart and lean about the processes we create. In product land, you should always be reiterating but these documents should serve as up-to-date living sources of truths.
1. Problem definition
A product manager should spend a lot of time trying to understand their users’ problems and pain points. This will include conducting extensive market and user research as well as stakeholder interviews to leverage insights and develop hypotheses. This research should help the PM define the key problems that the team/product will aim to address. You should not (and you cannot) address everything, so deciding which problems are worth solving is key.
2. Product vision
Sometimes the product vision is clear in the PM’s mind but is not communicated clearly across the team. A successful PM should be able to easily explain the product vision. What is the product vision? What problem is your product trying to solve? Who is it built for? What is it supposed to do? A product vision should be
- Ambitious
- Inspiring for the team
- Critical for users
- Easy to explain
- Shared out frequently
3. Product goals and success metrics
Product managers should clearly articulate what the product is trying to achieve and what are the quantifiable KPIs and metrics that are tracked to measure success.
4. Business model
A business model illustrates how a business/product can create value. The business model canvas captures the various components needed to build a product.
5. Product Requirement Documents (PRDs)
Product managers typically write product requirements in what is called a PRD. PRDs are the source of truth across teams.
6. Product roadmap
Roadmaps should tell a clear story of what the team is going to build and when. What is our timeline? What are we building next? What is our status on all of those features?
